A Hybrid Question Answering System
Waheeb Ahmed *
Department of Information Technology, Kannur University, Kerala, India.
P. Babu Anto
Department of Information Technology, Kannur University, Kerala, India.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
In this study, we propose a hybrid Question Answering (QA) system for Arabic language. The system combines textual and structured knowledge-Base (KB) data for question answering. It make use of other relevant text data, outside the KB, which could enrich the available information. The system consists of four modules. 1) a KB, 2) an online module, and 3) A Text- to-KB transformer to construct our own knowledge base from web texts. Using these modules, we can query two types of information sources: knowledge bases, and web text. Text-to-KB uses web search results to identify question topic entities, map question words to KB predicates, and enhance the features of the candidates obtained from the KB. The system scored f-measure of .495 when using KB. The system performed better with f-measure of .573 when using both KB and Text-to-KB module. The system demonstrates higher performance by combining knowledge base and text from external resources.
Keywords: Question answering, information retrieval, information extraction, knowledge base.